Leaving Puget Sound

"I saw the lights fading out..."

There was a moment in 2021 when stars, both good and bad, aligned and my wife and I found a kind of clarity that we hadn’t ever really considered. We’d moved here to the Pacific Northwest that summer after years of planning to leave California behind to find a place we could afford, and that we really liked. We arrived and the air was crisp and vibrant—followed immediately by a record heat wave with one day registered at about 113 degrees. My sister-in-law’s house, where we stayed, had no air-conditioning at that time. We were miserable. It felt like we were being punished for leaving a place where these types of heat waves were not unusual, and so it followed us.

But after getting the mystical mythology out of our heads, the air returned again to bright crispness and the summer that ensued was redolent of pine trees and spring flowers, impossible colors of bright yellows and purple, and dewy mornings giving way to bright days.

We found a house to buy and some roots to plant, Sue found good work and I was writing for a couple of different magazines in the wine industry as well as doing a little bit of substitute teaching when I could. Our daughter was in college, and we made a home that suited us and we ventured out to explore our new surroundings on a weekly basis finding favorite places to eat, hike and play.

But things changed rapidly in that first year. Our daughter’s story is not mine to tell, so I won’t do that here. All of our focus changed in an instant and her health rocketed to the top of any priorities we had. Everything else took a back seat, and it was then we realized that the “still small voice” that led us to this place was insistent for a reason—we needed to be here and we’d felt that there was a Divine hand involved in our move. That was the moment of true clarity. To us, this wasn’t just a choice to move — it felt more like we were summoned, called to this place. We had to be here to allow things to evolve as they did. And there was a kind of peace here among the trees and the greenery that allowed us to breathe during that time.

Sue continued work, and even took a better job than the first one she got, and I continued to write and sub for a short time until I became a primary caretaker. I was needed at home, and I went through a kind of counseling/training in order to be the person I needed to be and it changed me, changed our family—entirely and for the better. Those changes sit with me now and while I want to say they sit with me comfortably, more often than not I spend a good deal of psychic energy trying to figure out who I was before them — because those changes were necessary for me, and they were probably necessary 20 years ago.

Through serious work and discipline our daughter took on more of her own responsibilities and my caretaker responsibilities began to diminish bit by bit. By the end of the summer of 2022, she moved out with a good friend, found good work and went back to college, working to finish her degree—part time at first, and then full time by Fall of 2023. All parents of kids who graduate from college are proud, and all have a right to be. Our feelings when she graduated just last spring exceeded pride and I can’t find words to describe the joy we felt—and feel. It was May and spring was overloading the bright colors, long and comfortably warm days and cool nights. She overcame monumental hurdles, blockades even, and worked to begin to feel herself thriving again.

At the same time, with graduation in the rear view mirror, we began to realize that the calling we felt in being here had also diminished and the economics of this place began to exceed what we were bringing in making it harder to consider any kind of future that didn’t involve us working full-time for another 10 years. Now, I have trouble writing in ecclesiastical language. I always have had trouble with it, even speaking that way. I suppose that I’m just a bit more open to it now, but it still feels awkward to me. Yet, the persistence of the feeling of God’s guidance and that “still small voice, is ever present for us both.

In another instance of Divine inspiration or intervention, Sue had chosen to retire from her job as she grew less happy with the direction it was going. Last spring we celebrated her retirement as a sort of second to our daughter’s graduation, but within a couple of weeks of retirement, she was recruited into a job that allowed her to work primarily from home and paid even better than her previous job. Knowing that we were looking at higher property taxes, higher gas taxes and even higher food and grocery taxes, she ended her retirement and went back to work. We’d had a reprieve and we could stay in our home at least for the foreseeable future, which was a benefit to the whole family.

But as our daughter now makes choices to move her life forward, we are doing the same. We traveled extensively over last summer and early Fall (all documented here in these pages) and beyond the vacation aspect of those travels, we began to seek out places where we might find a less expensive way of life, and a chance for Sue to fully retire while I continued doing some writing and contributing. It’s been clear for sometime now that those places largely don’t exist on the west coast of the U.S., and even on the east coast, at least most of it. We’d have to move away from the coast areas where Sue has spent her whole life and I’ve spent most of mine.

We also knew that certain environmental factors would have to come into play because Sue suffers from pretty severe allergies, and we didn’t want to land any place that would exacerbate that condition, and Sue slowly came to the realization that while you can take the girl out of California, you might not be able to get her out of the west.

On a trip over to southwest Idaho to visit some friends last June, we spent a weekend enjoying everything we saw and felt there, as well as reconnecting with friends who moved there years ago. It’s a very different climate than the PNW, but it’s still a northern climate, and though much drier and hotter in the summer, it’s a place with four full seasons, something that both of us have come to appreciate and like a great deal, and we began to see that it might be a place where we could afford to feel at home.

New chapters are hard to think about as one gets older. I’m now 60, and while I never said never, Sue did say that this would be the last house we’d live in—-except that it isn’t, and we’re on the move. This spring, we’ll pull up the stakes we’ve planted here in the past five years in a place we’ve come to really love, but can no longer really grow in. The move will allow us to live relatively comfortably at a much lower economic cost while maintaining and owning a home and, for the first time for both of us, living nowhere near a large metropolitan area.

These mixed emotions of leaving a place we’ve come to love, but excited for a new adventure tug at each other at times. There’s a tension in them, but it feels natural and like something that ought to be. Life is, after all, about choices — but choices don’t always come easy, even if they’re necessary. Now, though, we’ve made the choice to embrace the change and we’re excited to put together a new life in a new place and all that entails.

Onward.